


Her flowers and my lonlieness

by winglessburst



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Completed, F/F, Fate, Getting to Know Each Other, Girls Kissing, Lesbian Romance, New Beginnings, finding yourself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-10-01 21:42:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20414383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winglessburst/pseuds/winglessburst
Summary: When one is lost, sometimes it just takes the outstretched hand of a stranger to help them find home again.





	1. Act 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this short story in day. One Sunday where I felt particularly lost and hopeless but I didn't want to cry about it. I hope it comforts you like it comforted me.

It was that time of the day where the sunbeams cast shadows all over the path before me. Every ray promised warmth and every spot of premature darkness sucked it away. But it didn’t phase me, nothing did these days. 

The path that I walked on was neither city nor country but some wanna-be of both, and so it ended up redundantly ordinary and neither. Shops lined the left side of the street and forest lined the other. I walked the sidewalk that only ran a path next to the shops that probably funded its creation for their prospective customers. 

With every step though my eyes drifted to the trees to my right. Instead of the dense dark lines cast by the sunlight against the buildings and telephone poles, the leaves created an abstract speckling of soft sun against the vegetated ground that covered much of the soil it all grew from. 

Weeks and months and even years ago that had been a sight that struck awe in me. So much awe that I’m sure it spilled from my heart and my eyes sparkled with it. I’m sure the wonder had once pulsed through my veins and lit up my skin. I hadn’t been much for awe and wonder these days. 

I hadn’t been much of anything these days, and on days like these it was hard to completely believe I had ever been. 

My nose begins sniffling and I stop walking for a moment to just breathe. I try to convince my nose that the spring air in May always had a bite to it and that is why it was choking up, why I was choking up. 

People have told me all my life that spring meant new beginnings but this spring, this May, the 22nd to be exact, I had met an end. Today was the day that my boss finally fired me. I had felt it coming for a long time, since the bustle of the holidays ended and they no longer needed so many people sitting at their desks. 

The anxiety of knowing that soon, every minute you spent working on something for someone else would become fruitless effort. It was a suffocating thing. It choked the awe and wonder from my very soul and left me empty. Till empty was my new descriptor, maybe even my middle name if this went on long enough. 

Would it continue now that I will truly lose everything else? 

I had spent the end of winter and the beginning of spring catching up. Catching up on my bills, catching up with friends and family, catching up my grades, catching up on sleep, but this would reverse all that. In the weeks maybe months it could take me to get something new, something sustainable, I would be behind once again. The turtle who truly could never win because some rabbits never tire. 

A family chattering behind me jolts me from my thoughts and they walk around me stealing glances as I roughly wipe up my fallen tears. They continue down the path and forget the girl tearing up alone on the sidewalk holding a box of all her office things she should have never accumulated. 

The sun moved in the sky and the shadow in front of me slowly shifts and engulfs me. 22 is my new unlucky number. If only my birthday was closer than November so I could quickly shed the age. Maybe my 23rd year would bring the wonder back into the world, into my world. 

I stared ahead of me for another long while and listened to the sound of the dread of going back home to my rundown apartment to my fish who I could no longer afford to feed or keep the light on for. Instead of going home I walked to the end of the block I was on and turned to the street on my left. 

It was unfamiliar territory to me but at the moment all I wanted to be was lost, erased, I desperately craved a new beginning. I wished for the beginning of a story with a happy ending you hear about in the prologue so you don’t have to skip to the last chapter in an attempt to keep your heart safe. 

As I walked the stores became far and few between and soon the sidewalk turned to gravel and dirt to compliment the pavement full of faded lines and potholes to my right. Cars continued to travel up and down the road beside me and I decided if the road didn’t have an end to it then I would not stop here. The end of the sidewalk was not the end I needed right now. I was in search of something much more satisfying, possibly even more permanent.

I shuddered at my thoughts as the wind picked up around me whistling through the trees that now lined both sides of the road I was on. I’m not sure if I hoped it to be a road to nowhere or a road to somewhere, all I knew was that my heels were not built for gravel and dirt.

Every rock hit the long thin heel wrong and I would nearly fall into the road as my ankle twisted this way and that and every dirt patch would engulf the heel hungrily. The pain and the frustration felt so necessary, so cathartic. After everything I could still feel something. Pain isn’t an emotion but frustration, anger, the panic, that was something. 

And I would take anything. I would walk through a storm of my worst, anger, sadness, grief, if it meant I could cross through this valley of loneliness. 

Fear became a very real possibility I hadn’t thought of just yet as the sun began to blink out while the earth’s surface eclipsed it. The be in the forest alone was a tragedy. To walk the side of the road by the forest in the dark was a disaster, and for modern day me, certainly nowhere near natural.

As the cars became far and few between I realized the forest gave off a sound of its own. Every rustle raised my heart rate but the cricket sound and frog ribbits created a screaming chorus that I hadn’t heard in a very long time. Flickers of nostalgia tried pumping through me but the rustles here and there kept anything but fear at bay. 

Still I stumbled on. The stars began twinkling in the sky in the sliver of it I could see through the trees. As the sight of them filled me with nothing I knew I had lost myself. The accomplishment was not the triumph I had thought it would be when I started down this road. My footsteps stilled to a halt and I sighed a trembling breath as I sank to a squat setting the box on the ground in front of me before leaning heavily on it. 

I covered my eyes with my arms as my face pointed towards the ground. Gravity pulled more tears from me. 

If I survived this would it be my lowest point? 

I thought about the faces of the people I knew. My family, the ones still alive, had always been burdened by my existence since my mother, father, and younger brother died in a car crash in the city. None of them could justify paying my way when they barely knew me at 15. 

Some tried, my aunt and uncle tried. But the strain was too much for them and at 17 I left for this town, 56 miles away from them all. My friends, like my family, were also 56 miles away or farther depending on their college of choice. 

They pitied me but they worked less than I did at 16 and could never support me. I’m not even sure they could cover the cost of my fish, or if they would, not many people enjoy the company of fish. Besides, I’d never tested our bonds like that, strain always made a good thing snap, no matter how strong the string it hung on was. In the end, snapping apart was inevitable. 

A car I had heard approaching to my right braked to a squeaky stop and the sound of a car door opening caused me to quickly look up. Filling my sight was a darkly colored pick up truck with a lumpy tarp covering the the cargo in the open trunk. It’s lights lit up the road ahead of it and just like me it was heading in the direction of lost. 

Then my eyes centered on her. She was nearly a silhouette against the dim lights from inside the cabin. They captured her eyes which seemed wide. The hue of her skin was pale and seemed to glow as well. 

Was she creating moonlight? 

“Are you ok?” She called against the expanse of the narrowing road. Am I ok? What was I even doing? Suddenly having to explain my dramatic actions to a stranger flooded me with embarrassment and shame. I couldn’t help but cover my face once again. My arms were wet but it was the better alternative. I heard the car door slam shut and I waited for the sound of a revving engine to start up and disappear down the lane at a speed I could only dream of in these heels. 

Instead I heard sure and steady footsteps approach me, and as my eyes peeked up there was light shining on me from the phone in her hand. I blinked at it.

“Oh, sorry.” She quickly moved it’s beam lower and out of my eyes. “What are you doing out here?” She asked. Her voice was light and had a clear sincerity in it that rang against the shrivelled up vessels of my heart. I looked down at the the part of the ground by both of our feet that was now visible in the beam of unnatural light.

“Just, walking.” I say. My voice, like my earlier sigh, was trembling. My body still had more tears to cry, just peachy. She crouched down beside me. And slowly reached out to move some hair out of my face. Wind rustled by as if to check on the scene the forest had informed it about. They were whispering back and forth as the leaves rustled their reply. Most likely commenting on how dirty my shoes now were, and how lose my hair had become from the pin holding it up earlier that day. 

“I own a flower shop just a little farther up the road. Why don’t you come with me and warm up a bit?” She says. I meet her eyes then. I still can’t quite make out their color but they seem to be framed in worry. It was a kind of worry I only ever remember from my mother, and as she stood up and outstretched her hand I found myself reaching out to take it.

There are moments when you make the decision to stop deciding things and you end up being whisked in a direction you never had foreseen. Life always challenges you to try to control it, the forever power struggle. But as she pulled me across the street into the passenger side of her truck and I breathed in the fresh scent of wildflowers I finally began to feel like neither life nor I held the control. And for once that was a blissful thing. 

A very blissful thing indeed. 


	2. Act 2

Her aforementioned flower shop seemed to come into view in the blink of an eye. We travelled up the road a ways, made a right turn and then we were pulling into the tiny gravel parking lot covered on all sides with vegetation. Some in pots, some in plots but everything was lit up by soft outdoor lights that lined the drive in and the surrounding area. 

“Just sit in the truck for a bit, I need to unload. I’ll be right back.” She left the car running and let the heat continue to flood the cabin of the truck. She had turned it on when my shivering became too evident to the both of us. My feet ached finally registering the hell they had just gone through. 

She lifted the tarp and unveiled a tiny habitat of flora tucked into every corner of the bed of her truck. My eyes widened at the sight. The soft yellow outdoor light glinted off of the petals of at least a hundred tiny flowers clumped together in potted bushes. They shone in an array of colors and no matter how hard my mind searched I could not find the name of them anywhere in my collective memory. 

With a creak and click she opened the back and grabbed the first 2 massive pots. Her round curvy frame obviously hiding toned muscle where my thin tiny one lacked it. Still I felt just as useless sitting and watching her work as I had when I was packing my things into the box now sitting on my lap earlier that day. 

Without another moment of hesitation or thought I turned the heat off and turned the key in the truck to preserve the gas keeping it alive and swung my door open. When my heels hit the gravel underneath I stumbled slightly before I turned around and placed the box on the seat I had just been sitting on. 

By the time I closed my door and walked to the back of the truck she was already carrying the next 2 pots inside the now lit shop. I look down at the ground and sigh as I slip off my shoes. Ignoring the pointed stones beneath me I grabbed one pot and trudged to the walkway of her store that is paved by randomly placed larger smooth stones. They became a cool relief on my beaten feet. She gave me a smile as she passed by and the unfamiliar movement in my heart in response had me walking faster towards the shop and away from her infectious happiness. 

After I opened the door I had to pause and take in the sight before me. My breath left my lungs in a rush and my eyes rapidly blinked as if the sight before them could disappear at any moment. On my next breath in the sweet sweet scent filled my nostrils and my mind worked to inscribe every detail to its lobes. 

I had just walked into the sort of flower shop they can only recreate in animated movies or vaguely describe in a book. Floor to ceiling it burst with flowers and greenery. As my eyes continued to take it all in I began to see the organization in the beautiful mess. 

Above my head were floating rocks with various plants growing atop them and hanging pots to suit any front porch. To my left there seemed to be mostly bushes and outdoor plants. I also spotted the four pots she had already brought in. 

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” She said from behind me, making me jump and spin on my heels. Somehow I managed to keep my footing as I leveled my gaze with her lips. Of course she was taller than me, most people were. 

“Take what as a compliment?” The question bubbled from my lips as my eyes roamed slowly over her face now that I could see it in the full light. She cracked another smile and shifted the two potted plants in her arms. 

“That look in your eyes. Knowing that I can grow plants that make someone look at them like that is one of the greatest compliments.” She nodded her head to what was now my right and her left while I looked at our feet and willed my face to stop heating up. “Come on, you can set that down over there.” 

I nodded and shuffled over to the other pots and she walked next to me. We sat the pots down together and walked to the truck. After a few more trips we had them all inside, plus my box and heels, and were sitting together in the studio apartment space she lived in above her store. I was seated at her little wooden table in the corner of her tiny kitchen and she was leaning on the one clutter free counter waiting for the water in the tea kettle on the stove to whistle. 

She was looking at me. Her eyes a gorgeous honey brown. The dark of the night did her no justice at all, not even her silhouette fully depicted the perfection of her curves and how her black pin straight hair framed her round pale cheeks in a way that kept the fluttering in my chest very much alive. She was still watching me. I cleared my throat feeling somehow obligated to break the silence. 

“So, how long have you been into planting?” I asked just before the kettle’s whistle whined through the building. She pulled it off of the stove and poured the steaming water into the two mugs she had prepared. She was still smiling softly as she walked the mugs over to the table and me and placed them down on our respective settings. “Thank you.” I muttered. I glanced into my mug to see the metal ball floating in the hot water containing some kind of tea mix. 

“Ever since I lived with my grandmother. She taught me everything she knows.” She pulled her mug up to her face and breathed into it so the steam washed over her face. Her eyes closed for a second as if she existed in her own space and every moment she live in was timeless. Then her dark lashes lifted and her honey eyes were looking into my dull brown ones. “How long have you been into walking alone at night on dangerously secluded roadways?” She counters. 

I felt like there was no hiding from the steadiness of her gaze but still I made an attempt. Looking down at my mug I too pulled it closer to my face and breathed out letting my eyes close as she had as if I was researching her secrets to freezing time. Only I didn’t feel timeless, I just felt lost again and embarrassed. Her beauty and confidence intimidated me. My fluttering heart wanted to make the best impression it could on this stranger but we had failed straight out of the gate. When I looked back up she was still watching me, waiting to hear some epic tale of woe, most likely.

“I’m not into it at all.” I said. She pursed her lips and my eyes watched them move for just a moment. She had no makeup on her entire face but on her full round lips I could glean a gleam of chapstick. 

“What are you into then?” She asked. I looked down at the steaming water in my hands again. What was I into? What was I going to college for again? Oh yes, general studies, I couldn’t narrow down a major. What did I do when I wasn’t working or studying? I would watch my fish.

“I have two freshwater fish. Bonita and Clairita, although I think they might both be guys.” She laughed at that. Her laugh was like a twinkling and my mind then filled with stars. If god is just he would give stars a laugh like hers, if he ever existed at all, if any of us do. 

“What colors are they?” She asked when her giggles had subsided. I was taken aback by the question. No one ever wanted to know more about my fish. My lips pressed together for a moment battling the smile that had begun to crest on my face. 

“Bonita is a whitish yellow with black stripes and Clairita is a pure white. They are both angelfish and they both carry rainbows on their backs when the sun shines on them just right.” I explained. Her smile grew softer still and her other hand reached to a yellow carnation on display amongst the brightly arranged bouquet pressed up to the wall at the end of the table. After pulling it out, she shortened the stem and reached over to tuck it behind my ear letting my dark brown frizzy curls hold it in place. Her teeth show in the smile that breaks across her face next. 

“They sound wonderful. I’d love to meet them someday.” She said. The fluttering in my heart grew two sizes under that gaze of hers. Something about it was not how most people looked at me. And it caused a thrill to shift through me. 

Then her gaze travelled around the room. Her apartment was much like the shop downstairs and had flora tucked into every free corner and on most surfaces. In the middle of the room was a futon that cut off the kitchen area and turned the area it was facing into a homey living room. I followed her line of sight and felt the nostalgia of wonderment slowly seep into me. Then she turned to me again.

“Do you like movies?” She asked. Her face was alight in mirth and I couldn’t fight the smile anymore. I nodded and fearlessly took a sip of my tea. Its warmth washed through me and cleared the stuffiness in my lungs, the clogs blocking out my heart. I sighed resfreshed as I pulled the mug from my lips. She had taken a sip of hers at the same time and produced the same contented sigh a moment later. 

“I’d never say no to a good movie.” I became brazen. She smiled again in answer and got up taking my hand and me along for the ride as she pulled us to the futon. She had me sit and placed her mug on the coffee table in front of it before crossing over to the cabinet the television sat on. She milled through it for a few moments and came out producing a single movie titled, Saving Mr. Banks. 

“Voila, what say you?” She asked. I pressed my lips together again and nodded before the grin broke across my face. It infected her and she grinned back before popping it into the player and turning everything on. She came back to sit next to me and used the remote to quickly get us to the movie. 

I had no idea what I was in for when it started but I felt deeply for the main character’s anguish over her lost father. The scenes flitted across the screen in the sequence of a beautiful story and when I began to cry she handed me the tissue box and rubbed circles into my back. She inched closer to me and made jokes about the movie as it continued coaxing away my sadness and by the time the credits rolled our hands were intertwined in her lap and I was leaning against her shoulder laughing about something she had said. 

When I popped my head up to look at her for the first time since the movie had been on she chuckled at my bleary eyes and I heard the pull of another tissue from the tissue box in my lap before she dabbed the white cloth on my drying cheeks and around my eyes. I gave a short laugh as well as the situation we were in felt almost funny. The comfort her touch gave me was palpable and scary in how much I craved more of it. Comfort had become a thing so far removed from my life in the last few years. Its gossamer whisper against my skin was the greatest pull. 

We shared a silent moment when she let the tissue and her hand fall back into my lap. Our eyes became pulled together by a string. It was thin and easily breakable but somehow we kept it together as it threaded slowly into something stronger than it had been. Another string began to thread around us and I realized she had pulled me into that timeless space she seemed to always exist in. Suddenly we both were all that existed. 

Her lips encircled mine as, together, we closed the gap. My head made the world spin around us as it wrapped itself around the soft warmth of her lips on mine and the subtle strength of her every movement as we pressed them together again and again. I felt her hand softly cup my cheek causing the flower behind my ear to fall between us and my heart soared, taking me with it. 

We were two girls, two strangers kissing, and all we could really tell was that this was not going to be the last time, because it was only the beginning. 


End file.
